UNIONS
MUST MOVE LEFT - THEY HAVE NO ALTERNATIVE
Questioning the Direction of U.S. Labor
By David Bacon
Monthly Review, September 2009

A Review of Solidarity Divided
By Bill Fletcher Jr. and Fernando Gapasin
University of Californa Press, 2008

Through the 1980s I was a union organizer and activist in our Bay Area
labor anti-apartheid committee. As we picketed ships carrying South African
cargo, and recruited city workers to support the African National Congress
(then called a terrorist organization by both the U.S. and South Africa),
I looked at South African unions with great admiration.

The South African Congress of Trade Unions, banned
in the 1950s, had found ways to organize African and Colored workers underground,
to support a liberation struggle in a broad political alliance. Heroic
SACTU leaders like Vuysile Mini gave their lives on the scaffold for freedom.
Then, as apartheid tottered and eventually fell, SACTU unions became the
nucleus of a new federation, the Congress of South African Trade Unions.
With roots in that liberation war, it declared socialism as its goal,
and still does today.

COSATU unions prize rank-and-file control over
their elected leaders, and engage members in long and thorough discussions
of the country’s development plans. The labor federation has the
most sophisticated political strategy of any union in the world today
– balanceing a leading role in the tripartite alliance that governs
South Africa with independence of program and action, even striking to
force policies that put the needs of workers before the neoliberal demands
of the World Bank. Jacob Zuma owes his election as president of South
Africa today to South African labor.

As an organizer during the same period I worked
with many others to force our own labor movement to recognize that organizing
new members and changing our politics was necessary for survival at home.
If we could double our size (at least), I thought, we’d have more
power, while the streetheat generated by the intense conflict organizing
creates would set the stage for political transformation. Needless to
say, that transformation process turned out to be much more complicated
than I expected.

At the beginning of Solidarity Divided, Bill Fletcher
recalls a comment made by a healthcare unionist at a meeting in South
Africa which sums up at least part of what makes COSATU so different from
the AFL-CIO. “’Comrades,’ they began, ‘the role
of the union is to represent the interests of the working class. There
are times when the interests of the working class conflict with the interests
of the members of our respective unions.’”

Fletcher and Fernando Gapasin, Solidarity Divided’s
coauthor, use the quote to dramatize two important differences between
our movements. South African unions talk about workers’ class interests,
using words that still frighten unionists here. And not only can COSATU
militants see the potential conflict that can sometimes arise, but believe
that when it does, unions should put the interests of all workers before
their own institutional needs.

There are many differences between the U.S. labor
movement and other union movements around the world. In France in recent
months workers have imprisoned their bosses in their offices to force
them to negotiate over the closure of factories and job elimination. On
May Day hundreds of thousands of workers poured into the streets in Germany
and Russia, and in Turkey unions had to battle the police for the right
to stand in Taksim Square. In El Salvador unions supported the guerrilleros
during a civil war to upend Central America’s most unjust social
order, while their offices were bombed and their leaders killed. In the
Philippines workers commonly put up tents at the gate of a factory on
strike, and live there until the strike is over. Even workers from Mexico
and Canada use phrases like “working class” as part of ordinary
conversation.

By comparison we seem pretty conservative. Our
labor movement has resources and wealth that are enormous by comparison
with most unions around the world. But our own existence and power is
just as threatened as that of many others.

The purpose of Solidarity Divided is not to compare
us unfavorably with labor elsewhere, or to mount an unrelieved criticism
of our conservatism. It is to ask questions, so that we can come to grips
with the problems that endanger our survival. And the experience of unions
and workers in other countries, while it can’t be transferred or
copied, can at least inspire us with the courage to face our own situation
with realism and the determination to change it.

Solidarity Divided has been criticized by some activists for the dark
picture it paints of the situation faced by unions in the U.S. It is not
a hopeless one, but it is certainly sobering. Few would argue that with
12% of workers in unions there is no crisis for U.S. labor. And the authors
are not saying that workers can’t win in conflicts with employers
today, or with the political system. The continuation of the Bush era
was defeated in large part by union activists, money and votes. Workers
can still win major organizing drives, as they did after a sixteen year
struggle at Smithfield Foods in North Carolina. US Labor Against the War
can win labor to call for U.S. troops to leave Iraq, and for solidarity
with Iraqi workers.

But in reality, the working class here at home
faces profound changes that have fundamentally undermined its political
rights and standard of living. Over the last four decades, corporations
have built an international system of production and distribution that
links together the workers of many countries, but in which workers have
no control over the expropriation and distribution of the wealth they
create. Further, this system has forced devastating and permanent unemployment
on entire generations of U.S. workers, especially in African American
and Chicano neighborhoods. Meanwhile, neoliberal economic policies displace
communities in developing countries, creating a reserve labor force of
hundreds of millions, migrating both within and across borders, desperate
for work.

Fletcher and Gapasin wrote Solidarity Divided before
the current economic crisis, which only highlights the problems they describe.
Many elements of this crisis are structural, and won’t disappear
with the next turn of the business cycle. Workers increasingly can’t
buy back what the system produces – the bizarre loan conditions
that financed home purchases only illustrate that thousands of purchasers
didn’t have the income necessary to buy housing.

For unions and workers to survive in this environment,
they must demand increasingly radical reforms. As Fletcher and Gapasin
point out, the idea that “the needs of workers can be met by the
bargaining demands and institutional needs of unions” is a relic
of a vanished past.

Corporations today are almost entirely opposed
to any reforms to the current system, whether single payer healthcare
or the right to a job. They’ve discarded the social charter in which
employers accepted the existence of unions, under certain conditions,
after World War Two. When one considers the ferocity with which they battle
the relatively minor changes in U.S. labor law proposed by the Employee
Free Choice Act, it’s clear that to them the idea that unions should
be encouraged, an ideal enshrined in the preamble to the National Labor
Relations Act, is just so much meaningless verbiage.

Despite a desperate desire by U.S. labor leaders
to revive mutual respect between corporations and unions, Fletcher and
Gapasin say, “that peace has not come. Nor can these leaders, nor
anyone else, identify any sector of corporate America that intends to
establish a new social compact with labor.”

Each
month for the last year, over half a million people have lost their jobs.
Banks, meanwhile, have been showered with hundreds of billions of dollars
to keep them afloat, while working families can’t get their loans
renegotiated so they can stay in their homes. Yet there has been no national
demonstration called by either labor federation, demanding a direct Federal
jobs program or redirecting the bailout to workers instead of the wealthy.
Remember those French workers? They’re not just organizing (yet
another!) general strike protesting the same conditions, but holding their
bosses hsotage.

The book, then, is about change. Where did labor’s
current conservatism come from? We too have a radical past. In the U.S.
people also used to talk about the working class, debated the nature of
capitalism, and discussed strategies for radically transforming or replacing
it. So what happened? Why is it now so difficult for labor to change?

One of the most valuable parts of Solidarity Divided
is its examination of our own history. It is not a detailed academic history,
but it establishes the fact that U.S. labor has always had a left wing
that advocated the organization of all workers and radical social change,
at the same time that racism limited its potential.

William Syvis organized the National Labor Union
and included African Americans during the post-Civil War decades, yet
failed to protest the end of Reconstruction and the reestablishment of
the racist white power structure in the south. The Wobblies organized
immigrants in many languages, and used free speech fights and working
class songs and music to organize a population of itinerant floating workers.
We see day labor unions developing the same ideas today. The CIO won the
crucial battle to organize the country’s basic industry, but lost
its radicalism in the purge of the left, substituting a centralized bureaucracy
for earlier rank-and-file democratic traditions.

To change, we need to reexamine the ideas and strategy
that are part of our own inheritance. But we also need to come to grips
with the purges that drove that leftwing culture underground.

One of the most important reasons why change is
so hard for U.S. unions is the continuing legacy of the cold war. Fletcher
and Gapasin make a crucial contribution in urging a reexamination of the
cost paid for the suppression of the left. That period may seem long ago,
but it fundamentally shaped the relationship between leftwing activists
and their ideas, and the centers of power in modern unions. “Today
the dominant coalition of traditionalist and pragmatist union leaders
continues to shape union culture,” they say, “whereas leftists
get coopted or marginalized. This situation limits the union movement’s
scope and narrows unions’ political and social impact.” Although
Solidarity Divided has a rare analysis of the role of new left militants
in unions during the post-Civil Rights years, it offers no comment on
why those activists made so little effort to come to terms with the history
that created the conservatism against which they rebelled.

No pair of authors can write a prescription for
change – “just do what we say and your problems will be cured.”
But they can urge us not to be afraid of facing the truth, and Gapasin
and Fletcher do that.

Discussion in labor is difficult because the cold
war taught unionists that political differences beyond a limited range
would result in marginalization at best, expulsion at worst. You can’t
talk freely if you’re afraid for your career or your job. That cold
war straightjacket strengthened a hierarchical structure and culture,
very differnt from the egalitarianism in COSATU or Salvadoran unions.
We have forgotten the wobblies’ idea that we’re all leaders,
equals among equals. At the same time, unions have accumulated property,
treasuries, and political debts, and have an interest in defending them,
making institutional needs paramount. We don’t challenge the government
out in the streets beyond a certain point becaaue we don’t want
to risk not being at the table when the deals affecting our future are
made.

Fletcher and Gapasin spend a great deal of the book analyzing the various
efforts to change labor’s direction following the election of John
Sweeney as president of the AFL-CIO at the New York convention in 1995.
One important reason for the halting and incomplete nature of these changes
was the failure to come to grips with what had come before. Labor needed
then, and still needs today, its own truth commission, to publicly discuss
the consequences of the anticommunist hysteria of the 1950s.

Radical ideas and the language to describe them
continue to be illegitimate because their suppression has been unacknowledged.
After 1995, the prevailing attitude in national leadership was, “We
don’t need to rehash the past. Let’s concentrate on where
we’re going now.” It’s difficult, however, to determine
that new direction if you can’t talk about where the old one was
headed, and what was wrong with it. Nowhere is this confusion more evident
than in labor’s attitude toward U.S. foreign policy. In Colombia
the barriers to solidarity with its leftwing union federation came down,
and unions like the Steel Workers became bastions of support for its embattled
unionists. Yet next door in Venezuela, U.S. labor supported coup plotters
against the radical regime of Hugo Chavez. Under pressure from US Labor
Against the War, the AFL-CIO publicly rejected U.S. military intervention
in Iraq. Yet the Democratic Party’s support for war in Afghanistan
and for Israel’s attack on Gaza are greeted with silence.

Change is always uneven and incomplete, but the
change process in U.S. labor has virtually stopped, leaving unions increasingly
caught up in internal divisions and conflict. Solidarity Divided was written
before the current internal struggle between SEIU and its California healthcare
local, and its intervention into battles within UNITE HERE. But these
are conflicts over the basic issues raised in the book – class partnership
vs. class struggle, and the right and ability of union members to control
their own organizations.

Lacking agreement on how and why the power of unions
was undermined by the suppression of the left, there has been no consensus
on what should replace the old cold war philosophy. Much of Solidarity
Divided, then, is devoted to description and analysis of the different
ideas about how labor should be revitalized, some good, some at best ineffective,
and some awful.

Both authors write as “participant observers,”
Fletcher as a highly-placed staff member at SEIU, then education director
at the AFL-CIO and special assistant to Sweeney, and Gapasin as a local
union leader, labor council head, and labor and ethnic studies professor
at UCLA. They were there for many of the arguments and movements they
describe, and they outline some of the most important efforts to get the
union movement to change direction – Jobs with Justice, the Los
Angeles Manufacturing Action Project and others.

They pay particular attention to the “organizing
model,” which was developed in opposition to the philosophy of business
unionism, in which members pay dues and receive in exchange union services,
as though a union was an insurance program rather than an organization
built to fight the boss. But, the book says, “reformers began to
worship member mobilization and activism, certainly a component of a vibrant
trade unionism, without much discussion of who should do the mobilizing,
what the objectives should be, and what methods were approporiate.”

An even bigger problem with this model, however,
was that it has so little interest in the education of workers about the
nature of the society in which they live. A deeper understanding (that
is, greater class consciousness) can lead to ideas for alternatives, both
in radical reforms of the existing system, and even its replacement. This
kind of education, part of the normal life of unions in South Africa or
El Salvador, requires an investment of time, and a real interest in how
workers think. People act autonomously based on their ideas, and workers
with greater understanding and consciousness are able to lead themselves
and each other, rather than acting solely on directives from above. Further,
while education doesn’t necessarily produce immediate mobilizing
results, it does treat workers as the people whose thinking, and eventually
whose leadership, is the key element in building a union.

Instead, Fletcher and Gapasin point out, the mobilizing
model produces unions that are directed by fulltime paid staff, in which
workers play a subordinate role. At worst, workers become almost irrelevant
in a numbers game in which the size of the union is what counts, rather
than creating an organization they can learn to use to challenge the employer
at work to win better wages and conditions.

Fletcher was himself the creator of the most ambitious
effort in decades to educate union activists and local leaders, a program
called “Common Sense Economics.” Strangely, Solidarity Divided
has no discussion of that experience. There are some other puzzling omissions,
especially the impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement. That
treaty caused a huge debate in labor which coincided with the rebellion
that eventually brought Sweeney into office. It marked a watershed in
the growing awareness among U.S. workers of the impact of globalization,
and brought forth important new movements of solidarity, especially between
unions and workers in the U.S. and Mexico.

Solidarity Divided has an important section on
globalization, but it sees it mostly in terms of military domination.
But what is new about the role workers play in this system? Are the anti-globalization
movemennts sweeping Europe and the developing world allies of the labor
movement? Do they propose real alternatives, or are they united primarily
by a common hatred of capitalism?

NAFTA and the battle in Seattle at the WTO not
only profoundly affected the thinking of workers about the future of their
own jobs, but they also set the stage for the huge debate over immigration
that followed. Those workers and unions who were educated by the debate
were in a much better position to understand the way neoliberal reforms
displaced workers and farmers in Mexico, and led to migration across the
U.S./Mexico border.

The debate over immigration policy now puts critical
questions before U.S. unions. Are unions going to defend all workers (including
the undocumented), or just some? Should unions support immigration enforcement
designed to force millions of workers from their jobs, so that they will
leave the country? How can labor achieve the unity and solidarity it needs
to successfully confront transnational corporations, both internally within
the U.S., and externally with workers in countries like Mexico?

Understanding that NAFTA hurt workers on both sides
of the border is a crucial step in answering these questions, providing
the raw material workers need to understand globaliztion. But raw material
is just that. Workers and unions need an education process, and educators,
who can help turn that raw material into consciousness and action. In
more radical times, that role of educator was played by leftwing socialist
and communist parties. Since this kind of organized left presence in labor
is so small today, it is unclear what can take its place. Solidarity Divided
helps in presenting the question, but no one has a good answer today for
this one.

Fletcher and Gapasin call for a new kind of unionism.
“The current framework of U.S. trade unionism is so fundamentally
flawed,” they say, “that a new framework is needed. With that
new framework will inevitably come new organizational structures, but
forging new structures without defining the moment and defining the framework
would simply create new problems.” Arguing that the kind of structural
proposals that led eventually to setting up the Change to Win federation
are meaningless without a change in political direction, they call for
discarding the body of ideas that guides unions today. They condemn the
effort to reduce every problem to a question of pragmatic organizing tactics,
while essentially seeking a strategic partnership with corporations and
the government.

“We call this new unionsim social justice
solidarity,” Fletcher and Gapasin say, and contrast it with “pragmatic
solidarity,” which sees alliances only in terms of what they can
offer to help unions win immediate battles. Using as examples the anti-apartheid
movement, the solidarity movement with Central America, and even the broad
oppostion to WalMart, they declare that “social justice solidarity
begins with an important assumption – that unions are workers’
organizations engaged in class struggle (whether they like it or not)
rather than corporations.”

It is unfair to expect the authors to come up with
quick solutions to such deeply-rooted problems, so many years in the making.
And absent the kind of discussion they urge, any suggestions for a new
direction are going to sound very general. Their most important contribution
is to put the questions. The labor movemenet is full of intelligent activists,
most with a deep loyalty to their class and a real commitment to social
change. Any change in direction depends on their willingness to call for
a much deeper discussion that can look for answers.

There
are no experts here. There are no leaders with quick fixes. It is time
for us all to take responsibility for the future of our own movement.
As the pair state in conclusion, “the U.S. union movement must become
part of a new labor movement. To do so, unions must move left; they have
no alternative.”
Solidarity Divided is a critical contribution to that effort.